BOOK REVIEW: CAMILLE PAGLIA

This is Camille Paglia's first major work, and the work with the most scholarly focus: a survey of Western literature with an emphasis on sexual decadence.

Paglia starts with a view of human nature wherein roles are heavily biologically determined and views all of Western Culture through this lens: all art either embraces the natural or struggles in denial against it.

Throwing her lot with Hobbes and Dionysus, she follows in the tradition of work like Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy," where engaging assertion and overstatement are more important than rigorously proving a case. She argues passionately, with poetic flair: for her, human sexuality is dark, cruel, sadistic, powerful, demonic, perverse, murky, decadent, pagan...

The bulk of the work is a survey of Western literature from this point of view, with emphasis on: Spencer, Shakespeare, Rousseau, de Sade, Goethe, Blake, William Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lord Byron, Shelley, Keats, Honore de Balzac, Theophile Gautier, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Emily Bronte, Swinburne, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry James, and Emily Dickinson.

From the first chapter to the last, Paglia writes much that is debatable, but also much that is thought-provoking.